COUNSEL TO THE PRESIDENT: A Memoir. By Clark Clifford with Richard Holbrooke. (Random House, $25.) A life and a career of extraordinary scope, recalled by the polished lawyer from St. Louis whose 45-year career as public and private adviser to generations of Democrats discreetly made him one of the century's most influential men.

A DAMNED SERIOUS BUSINESS. By Rex Harrison. (Bantam, $21.95.) A last observation on a life in comedy, written shortly before his death. Though sometimes vulgar and arrogant, Rex Harrison always worked at what he did best: presenting a superior facade over calculated insecurity. This book is another demonstration of his art.

DICKENS. By Peter Ackroyd. (HarperCollins, $35.) A conventional, in some respects old-fashioned biography, full of well-told anecdotes, that remains open to the peculiarity of its subject.

FREDERICK DOUGLASS. By William S. McFeely. (Norton, $24.95.) A detailed and finely written portrait of the former slave who became a great orator, civil rights crusader and editor.

FROM LENIN TO LENNON: A Memoir of Russia in the Sixties. By David Gurevich. (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, $21.95.) A dryly witty account of totalitarian life along the Volga offers an important lesson: the most typical horrors are not savage repressions but the routine humiliations of the average citizen.

FROM THE OLD MARKETPLACE. By Joseph Buloff. (Harvard University, $19.95.) Posthumously published, this charming memoir by a veteran of the Yiddish and Broadway theaters is cast as a tale of coming of age in prerevolutionary Lithuania.

GOD, COUNTRY, NOTRE DAME. By Theodore M. Hesburgh with Jerry Reedy. (Doubleday, $21.95.) The life of the priest best known as the president of the University of Notre Dame reads like oral history -- easily, at times breezily, as if the author were just chatting about himself.

KING EDWARD VIII: A Biography. By Philip Ziegler. (Knopf, $24.95.) The well-known story of how the Fairy Prince became a mortal takes on new freshness and excitement in this frank and generous portrait that draws on hitherto unavailable sources.

I REMEMBER NOTHING MORE: The Warsaw Children's Hospital and the Jewish Resistance. By Adina Blady Szwajger. (Pantheon, $20.) An unsentimental memoir, at once damning and uplifting, by a doctor who did her duty until it could no longer be done.

A LIFE OF HER OWN: A Countrywoman in Twentieth-Century France. By Emilie Carles, as told to Robert Destanque. (Rutgers University, $19.95.) Rural canniness is conveyed in the voice of a peasant in this memoir, immensely popular in France, of a sharp-tongued country teacher who fought to keep the Alps unspoiled.

A LIFE OF PICASSO: Volume One, 1881-1906. By John Richardson, with the collaboration of Marilyn McCully. (Random House, $39.95.) The first of a projected four volumes, this remarkable achievement brings to life the painter and the world he lived in.

LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN: The Duty of Genius. By Ray Monk. (Free Press, $29.95.) A vivid, credible, substantial biography of the philosopher, one of the world's smartest and oddest men.

MOSCOW AND BEYOND: 1986 to 1989. By Andrei Sakharov. (Knopf, $19.95.) The second volume of memoirs by the heroic Soviet physicist and democratic idealist covers his final years, from the end of exile to his last speech to the Congress of People's Deputies.

THE PATRIARCH: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. By Susan E. Tifft and Alex S. Jones. (Summit, $24.95.) This prodigy of research and interviewing is both a history of the family that built a distinguished newspaper empire in Louisville, Ky., and a psychodrama of the squabbling siblings who destroyed it.

PATRIMONY: A True Story. By Philip Roth. (Simon & Schuster, $19.95.) Mr. Roth brings his gift for attention and prodigious storytelling powers to his father's struggle with a fatal brain tumor in this agonized, often comic, infallibly realistic account.

RIGHTEOUS PILGRIM: The Life and Times of Harold L. Ickes, 1874-1952. By T. H. Watkins. (Holt, $35.) A huge yet charming biography of the articulate reform politician, F.D.R.'s Secretary of the Interior, who did so much to define liberalism in his time.

THE SEARCH FOR GOD AT HARVARD. By Ari L. Goldman. (Times Books/Random House, $20.) A Times reporter's engaging account of a year at the Harvard Divinity School.